Deer & Deer Hunting Forums: White Tail Deer Hunting Forum

I have been gun hunting with a group for the last 20 years in northern wi. So this year I wanted to take my 10 year old daughter on the youth hunt (which is a great program by the way) and just sit in a ground blind. I started baiting at the end of sep. I wanted to keep the corn pile close to our cabin so she wouldn't have to walk a long way to the stand for her first experience. Long story short she ended up shooting a 6 pt buck the first time. I realized then how nice it was to actually see a deer walking instead of running a 100mph being pushed by our hunting group. So I continued to keep corn there for us during the gun deer season and figured I would try my hand in bowhunting. I put up a ladder stand about 20 yards from the corn pile and about 50 yds from my cabin for us to sit in to be able to see a little farther. This is where I need help. Before gun season started I began getting a huge 12 pt coming into the corn pile that I started for my daughter and I. It continued to come in every night about a half hour after dark. I finally seen it Monday dec 23 at 4:30pm. He came walking through with another buck behind it at 40yds. I waited hoping it would come to the corn pile at 20yds but he stopped at 40 and then just kept walking. He hasn't been back on camera since but every other buck has. This is my first year bowhunting did I spook him off? What do you think happened? I know all the people with land that is near and no one else has ever seen him so I know the bucks area and no one else shot him. Did he move out????

What did the other buck that was following him do? Did he come to the corn, or continue following the 12pt? It's possible he winded you and moved on, or went into an area where there were some does that interested him. Some times fawns will come into heat in January, February, and that will keep a buck hanging around them. My guess is that he will be back. Sometimes a buck will come to a food source and load up and not return till several days later. He may have been run down and trying to build himself back up.

Remember that bucks roam a lot. That buck may be over on the other side of the county at this point.

One thing that trail cameras do is give the operator a false sense of what's out there. Think of a traffic camera posted along the route you travel to work. It takes a picture of you M-F, but it is not going to see you SAT-SUN. You may take a vacation, take a different route due to a detour, or you may be home sick in bed. A snapshot here and there is not going to give the traffic cop a true picture of your habits.

Corn piles have a similar problem. If you depend on a corn pile to attract bucks, then you set yourself up for something better over on the next property drawing your deer away. I'm not saying baiting is necessarily wrong, I'm just saying it is not sure-fire.

It is hard to get inside a buck's head. He's probably a lot like your average lounge lizard. He goes to this bar and that, looking for two-baggers and free food. If he gets chased out of a bar by a bouncer, or he sees someone he owes money to, he avoids that place for a while and when he goes back, he checks the parking lot first.

The thing that will attract him the most is a bunch of females that hang out at a place as regulars. That's why bars give drinks to the women for free. Make your place as attractive to doe as possible and the bucks will follow.

"It is hard to get inside a buck's head. He's probably a lot like your average lounge lizard. He goes to this bar and that, looking for two-baggers and free food. If he gets chased out of a bar by a bouncer, or he sees someone he owes money to, he avoids that place for a while and when he goes back, he checks the parking lot first.

The thing that will attract him the most is a bunch of females that hang out at a place as regulars. That's why bars give drinks to the women for free. Make your place as attractive to doe as possible and the bucks will follow."

shaman: I think this may be one of your best summations! I had a 'Nort woods Wisconsin old timer many years ago tell me on a bowhunt we were on in response to me then obsession with scrapes (we used to label them back in those days..."alpha scrapes", "beta scrapes", etc.).......

Big bucks tend to travel a certain circuit looking for the does. I can usually locate certain bucks on different trail cameras at different food plots and corn piles, based on the doe activity. If you were getting pictures or seeing him after dark, only to see him once during the daytime, check what the moon phase was on that day, and then plan to be in your stand during that phase when it comes around again. The does will probably be there feeding, and the buck will probably be back by to check 'em out on or around the same time and day of the phase.

Seriously, I'm trying to wrap my head around my own simile-- is a buck like a lounge lizard? I'm thinking. I've never been a lounge lizard, at least not for major parts of my life. However, I did know a guy-- well, he wasn't a lounge lizard exactly, but he DID teach me how to eat for free. This was about the time I started deer hunting too, so I guess you can call this a formative time in my life.

Ralph, my buddy, decided I needed to learn how to eat for free. Ralph was in his 40's. I was in my early 20's. It was odd, but I had a lot of close older male friends in those days. They are the guys who got me into shooting, into deer hunting, into a whole lot of things. They're all dead now, except for Ralph and Big Bob. Ralph was in early retirement due to health-- he'd been an exec at a large company before his heart attack. I was just breaking into data processing. I guess I complained about my grocery bill once. Ralph decided he could fix the problem.

It was true. You could eat for free every night of the week in Cincinnati in those days. You needed to know where and when, but there were free buffets at a lot of nice places during Happy Hour. Ralph would call me and tell me to meet him at Caddy's, or The Windjammer, or the Bombay Bicycle Club or some place like that. We'd have a drink, get our fill of potato skins, chicken wings, egg rolls or whatever and go home. Sometimes we'd find something cute to take home with us-- Ralph was much better at that. He paid more for his suits. He wore a Rolex. Over time, I learned a lot from him, and by the time Ralph left town to take up his new career as an international man of mystery, I was well on my way.

I'm thinking back now at these important lessons. 1) You never knew where Ralph and I would show up. Our two favorite haunts were Downtown or out on Chester Road, but we might be anywhere inside the I-275 loop. 2) The food situation changed constantly. We might show up at a joint that had been consistently serving good wings, and find the wings had run out. We would leave and not come back for months. 3) There were lots of female lizards out there, and some were vile. If we ran into a mouthy lush or a bevvy of skanks that would not leave us alone we might not come back ever.

See, one of the things being an unfettered self-published writer, is that I can get away with stuff like this. Let's see if the shaman can tie this confession of depravity and hedonism back to deer hunting.

My point here is that this is what putting out a free buffet buys you. Guys come by, check out the chicks, fill themselves and leave. They may buy one drink, but they don't stay for the evening. There is not going to be any consistency with the pattern. Food was not enough to hold guys like us, at least not so you could pattern us. Think about this too: if you're a barkeep and two guys in suits keep coming to your place night after night and stuffing themselves with your free food, how long is it going to last? Guys like Ralph and I had to keep moving, shifting our patterns just to preserve the illusion that we weren't freeloaders.

This last idea is kind of subtle. I don't know if bucks have that kind of awareness, but dogs and cats know when they're stealing food. I don't see why a buck would be any different. Ralph and I knew we were playing a system. You could not hit the same joint 5 nights in a row without the expectation of waitress or manager saying something. For as often and as long as I remember playing this gambit with Ralph and later alone, I don't remember the same waitress twice. I cannot say a buck sees a corn pile the same way Ralph and I saw a buffet table, but you can bet they notice that something is up. A skewer of barbequed shrimp doesn't show up like magic-- know what I mean?

One other thing: you can bait all you want. However, understand that bar owners have been putting out free lunch for generations, and been getting pretty much the same return on their investment. Ralph and I were eating $20 worth of food for $5 worth of drinks. The only place where you could ever pattern Ralph and I consistently was in our own bedrooms, and at my place on the weekends. My Friday night parties were awesome, and if you ask my friends from that era, they'll tell you the shaman's place was THE place to find interesting, intelligent women. Free food? I usually had a budget of $10 for the weekend. The rest was strictly BYO. The draw was this: if I wasn't deer hunting or turkey hunting, my door was open on Friday nights. Folks knew they were welcomed and they could plan their week around being there.

The lesson? Make your place the most consistently available, safe place to be-- especially for the doe. The rest will follow.

I did find myself, early in the fall, trying to knock over saplings with my forehead.

Remember, I was there to eat. For the most part I did most of my breeding activity back at my place. In fact, I sometimes didn't go more than 30 feet from my bedroom the whole weekend. It was a more successful strategy to invite women to a party than to try and put the make on them right there amid the cocktail shrimp and Crab Rangoon. Maybe Ralph could do it ( he had the Rolex) but I didn't have the same savvy. Back at "The Hole" (it was called the Black Hole Coffeehouse) I had a better chance to just be myself and investigate the likely candidates.

Remember that a big buck is . . . well, big. He literally has to eat-up a lot of real estate in order to keep himself fueled. In a lot of cases, a buck is twice the weight of a doe, plus he's got that chandelier that he has to grow every spring. In the Lounge Lizard model I'm putting forward, the buck is tossing over the whole buffet, cleaning out the kitchen and the reefer and then going after what's on everyone else's table and then moving on. That's about what he has to do to keep up that body and that rack. What's important to remember is that those doe weigh less and eat less. A small property can support a couple resident doe. The buck? He is knocking over the bars in Westwood tonight, and then cleaning out Tri-County tomorrow and then laying waste to Florence and Eastgate the rest of the week.